Background Information

To acquire irregular past tense verbs one must first learn to express things that happened in the past, before then learning the exceptions to the usual –ed ending. Irregular past tense verbs are problematic for young children and foreign language learners. Some basic ones are learned from a very early age. Most children learn to say “I did it,” before understanding that do and did are different versions of the same word. There is some predictability (teach–taught, catch–caught, get–got, forget–forgot), while often the unpredictability makes learning these words nothing short of memorization (take changes to took, while make changes to made). This property of the class of irregular past tense verbs to be both partly memorized and partly derived from predictable rules has caused these words to be key in the debate between evolutionary-psychological and Chomskyan-nativist models of language acquisition (Pinker, 2001).

Research suggests that children with SLI use bare stem forms (e.g. catch for caught) more frequently than younger control children (Rice, Wexler, Marquis, Hershberger, 2000). As has been shown with other language skills (Childers and Tomasello, 2002), research has implied that learning of irregular past tense verbs is facilitated through distributed practice rather than massed practice. Children with specific language impairment do not seem to learn these forms as effectively from adult repetitions of error sentences with the correct form of the verb (Williams and Fey, 2007).

Identification of the incorrect use of an irregular past tense verb helps develop the skill of correctly using these words. Knowing that catched “just sounds wrong” helps eliminate the common error of overgeneralization of the –ed form.

Tests that assess for irregular past tense verbs include the OWLS, the SPELT, the CASL-Syntax Construction, and the PLS.

Goal Suggestions

Joanne will correctly label later developing irregular past tense verbs, e.g. “What is the past tense of the word ‘shake’?”

Johnny will use the correct form of later developing and curriculum relevant irregular past tense verbs in varied sentences, e.g. “Use the word freeze in a past tense sentence beginning with yesterday.”

Elicitation Ideas

Pull out your phone (also works well on computers) and get extra practice with these FREE mobile irregular past tense pictures.

I absolutely LOVE your website! It has saved me countless hours. The language units and the activities are great, as well as the numerous ways you have referenced and linked to the pages. Thank you ever so much. I will be referring all of our District’s speech pathologists to the site. I hate to even mention it, but wanted you to be aware that there is a mis-link in this (irregular past tense) unit. Under “Word and Sentence Searches”, the very first sheet, the doc is correct but the pdf goes to a page from the “Category” unit. Thank you again for this masterful piece of work!

You have great ideas and the website has become a valuable resource to me. One thing I particularly appreciate is your _______ list in developmental order. Could you come up with one for irregular plurals? Thanks!

OK, I may be site illiterate, as far as being able to find things in the comments. I was informed of your reply to one of the questions asking for the verbs in developmental order, but all I could see was a partial listing:

Dawn, all I’m seeing is a question asking for irregular plurals in developmental order. I have a short list of those on the noun page (children, teeth, men, geese, women, feet, mice, sheep, people, deer, wolves, leaves, knives, phenomena, crises, etc.). To the best of my knowledge there just aren’t a whole lot of these other than some more highly specialized vocabulary. The verbs are at the top of this page. It’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, but I think it has most of the common ones.

Great post, thanks very much! I’m an English teacher in English language summer schools all over the world, so I know how hard people find irregular verbs. I will recommend this page to all my friends and students!

Thank you for all the WONDERFUL materials. You really made the class fun. The only thing I’d like to suggest is to put your name or website on the bottom. Sometime I download from different sites, and I don’t remember where I got something from. It makes it easier to get back to you. If teachers don’t’ like it, they can take it off; but I do think you should have some credit. Thanks again and take care.

I’ve found this website very helpful on several occasions, and I love that you share the research behind queries/topics. I am wondering where the verb lists (structured in such a way as developmental order) came from — your experience? journal articles? textbooks? I’m asking, not to critique the lists, but because, I find that there is a “soft structure” in most grammatical forms where children learn some words before others, but it’s difficult to find research on them. Thanks!

I would say they’re loosely based on a combination of my experience with levels from tests such as the OWLS, CASL, PLS, and CELF tests, and consulting Brown’s levels as well as Robert Owen’s language textbook. The lists are meant to be flexible and one would expect these, or similar lists, to differ from culture to culture, or from region to region especially with some more “semantic” words like nouns and verbs, and maybe there’s more consistency with more “syntactic” words, like helping verbs and pronouns. Thanks for the comment!

Hi I was wondering if you know of any norms regarding age of acquisition ranges of specific irregular verbs. I have come across a small list from Shipley et al., 1991 but would love to see a larger list!